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Vanilla Sugar
Split four vanilla beans, then with a knife scrape interior of each stick over three pounds fine sugar. Place sugar in a jelly glass with vanilla sticks, mix sugar well with vanilla, tightly cover and use as required. When a vanilla bean has been used wipe and place it in this sugar.
A simple pantry preparation that still outperforms anything bottled. Two things in the original need translating: the vessel is far too small, and the recipe gives no waiting time.
- The vesselA "jelly glass" is a small tumbler of roughly half a pint, which will not hold three pounds of sugar. Scale down to one bean per 12 oz of sugar in a pint jar, or use a two-quart jar with a tight lid for the full quantity.
- "Fine sugar"This means fine granulated, not confectioners' sugar. Caster sugar works well; powdered sugar contains cornstarch and cakes around the damp bean.
- The hinge: give it timeFilippini says "use as required," but the sugar tastes of nothing for the first few days. Shake the jar every day or two and wait at least two weeks; a month is better, and it keeps improving for months.
- Scraping the beansScrape the seeds and sticky pulp out onto the sugar, then bury the split pods in it as well. The pods hold most of the aroma and should not be discarded.
- Reusing spent beansThe last line is the practical part. A pod that has infused custard or syrup should be rinsed, dried thoroughly, and buried in the jar. Any moisture left on it will clump the sugar and can mould.
- Yield and useThree pounds is a professional kitchen's stock. Substitute it one for one for plain sugar in shortbread, custards, whipped cream, meringues, or coffee, and top the jar up with fresh sugar as you draw it down.
- StorageKept dry and tightly closed, it lasts indefinitely at room temperature. If the sugar hardens into a block, break it up with a fork or pulse it briefly in a food processor with the pods removed.
Vanilla sugar was one way a professional pastry kitchen kept vanilla on hand, and its appearance in The International Cook Book — compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York — suggests restaurant habit as much as household thrift, though the closing instruction to save a used pod is thrift of the most sensible kind. Vanilla is the cured seed pod of a climbing orchid native to Mexico, used by Mesoamerican cooks well before European contact; because the flower requires a specific pollinator, commercial cultivation elsewhere depended on hand pollination, a method generally credited to a young enslaved worker on Réunion in the 1840s and the reason the beans remained costly enough to be worth reusing. Sugar is an excellent carrier for the aromatic compounds in the pod, and it draws them out slowly and dryly, which is why the technique survives in European kitchens today as Vanillezucker and sucre vanillé.